Jamie Samdahl: “My mental illness and my poems live in mutualistic symbiosis. The two are hardly separate entities at all. Anxiety and depression are the fodder for poems, and then the poems pacify the illness’ rearing head, if only for a short while. How can we explain our mental illness to the ones most dear to us? Conversationally, it seems impossible. What’s needed is wild imagery, caesuras that invoke uneasiness, confusion, and fear. A poem that gives my reader a glimpse into my reality is a bridge to love.” (website)